Richard Landes is professionally a historian but in this book under review, he is a philosopher of violence; especially genocides and the Holocaust. The reviewer has synoptically read him, Susan Neiman on the one hand and Haruki Murakami and Stephen King on the other hand. The review flows between the history of ideas, philosophy and literary studies since all three are connected to each other. The world is in the grips of various fanatical fringes. Landes' magisterial text comes in handy in understanding our zeitgeist.

Notes:

This review has a typos which alters the meaning of a crucial sentence. There should be no period between understand and For, rather it should read as ...understand, for...